The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Video: Baguette Shaping

Brotkraft's picture
Brotkraft

Video: Baguette Shaping

Recently there have been many excellent posts and information on The Fresh Loaf about baguettes. Here is a small contribution focused on shaping. 

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Comments

Benito's picture
Benito

Wow excellent shaping!!!

Brotkraft's picture
Brotkraft

Thank you, Benito.  As you know, there are so many ways to shape.  Hopefully this will help add just one more tool to the toolbox of our fellow bakers.  

alfanso's picture
alfanso

Hi Steve and welcome to becoming an active member.  As most of us on TFL are amateur home bakers, and even fewer baguette aficionados, I think I can speak for most in saying that we're happy to have a working pro baguette baker become part of the community.  

As you might tell from our recent Community Bake over these past 4 months, there are a few dedicated baguetters in the crowd alway hungry for new advice and insight, as well as another crispy baguette with butter!

With the exception of the exceptional Bouabsa commercial yeast baguette formula and a very few others, we generally have stuck with levain based bakes.  To sum up the most consistent challenges that we've collectively tackled successfully through trial, error and iteration, our top three have been:

  • open crumb in the baguette form
  • determining when bulk ferment is optimally completed, done by some (not named alfanso) with an aliquot container.
  • getting an appropriate and sufficient grigne and an ear that lifts from the surface of the baton. 

alan

Brotkraft's picture
Brotkraft

Hi Alan, 

It's nice to meet you!  Thank you for the feedback.  It's funny, the general challenges you stated - open crumb, gauging bulk fermentation,  scoring - are shared by home and professional bakers alike:-)  I hope sharing some of my experiences can help. 

Best regards,

Stephen

 

PS - your cranberry semolina baguette looks delicious :-)

Yippee's picture
Yippee

Yippee